The kids and I, after appropriate and vigilant isolation, went home to Illinois for Christmas. My moms have also been isolating. My sister and brother-in-law have also been isolating. This meant we got to be a big old isolated pod.
I hadn’t appreciated how cut off I’ve been from my family this year. I knew it in a logical way, but had been cordoning off grieving that separation. It lived in a box underneath all of the other detritus that took up 2020.
Here’s the thing, it’s also meant almost the entirety of my first year of parenting was spent without the physical presence of my family. Thinking back now of all the questions in my home study interview that invoked my family as my support network, it seems impossible to have made it through.
Honestly, there were moments of figuring out who we are as a family this year that also had me wondering if we would.
In those interviews, my caseworker asked me, “What do you think could change as a result of placement of children?” My answer, “Everything could change. It won’t all change, but I need to be ready to deal with anything changing.”
If I’d only known.
These two weeks, though. Watching the kids really respond to our larger family as THEIR family. Seeing them with their baby cousin, who has never known a version of our family without them. Watching them hug and receive hugs freely. Again, I appreciated logically that this would all happen – eventually. Emotionally, though, I held back hope that we’d see it this Christmas.
I’m a bit worried I might be holding back hope on a more global scale. Not all hope, mind you. More like, I’m keeping a bit of it back in situations where I’d normally be Head Optimist in Charge.
A former student posted yesterday on Facebook that a former therapist of his advised sitting and making a list of the things he’d accomplished within a year. A tool for regaining perspective. The idea has been knocking around in my brain since reading it. After 900+ miles of driving today, I don’t have it in me right now, but it feels like a good step in the pathway to claiming back more hope.